Local MPs at heart of Phoenix controversy

As Ottawa roils over the botched Phoenix payroll system and the pain it's inflicting on civil servants hwo go unpaid for months, two Regina MPs find themselves at the heart of the political controversy.

Will Chabun, Regina Leader-Post

Updated: July 29, 2016

Despite being held in mid-summer, there was a surprisingly full house for a Commons committee meeting studying the government's botched payroll program, called Phoenix.Leader-Post files

Erin Weir first heard about missing paycheques in his capacity as MP for Regina-Lewvan constituency. Civilian employees at the RCMP’s “Depot” Division living in his riding brought them to his attention.

Now, almost everybody’s heard about it: A federal payroll system called Phoenix that’s failed to work properly and left some employees without accurate paycheques — or any cheques at all — for months on end.

And by coincidence, Weir and another southern Saskatchewan MP, Conservative Tom Lukiwski, find themselves at the heart of the matter.

Weir is the federal NDP’s critic on procurement and government operations; Lukiwski, who represents the adjoining Moose Jaw-Lake Centre-Lanigan, is chair of the Commons’ government operations committee, which held a much-anticipated meeting on the issue Thursday.

And the two MPs, normally miles apart, agree it’s not a pretty picture.

Conservative MP Tom Lukiwski.Bryan Schlosser /
Regina Leader-Post

Weir, who remembers when the government said “only 77” civil servants were facing problems with Phoenix, said it admits to hassles around 80,000 accounts.

And the stories have been grim: Civil servants missing mortgage, credit card and tuition payments.

There are also poignant stories about workers in the government’s payroll processing centre in Miramichi, N.B., who are “under an incredible amount of stress,” Lukiwski said.

He’s heard of them working hard to get the system working, then “breaking down and crying” in frustration because it wouldn’t respond.

Lukiwski said government officials told him “there’s no going back” to the old payroll system or even an emergency manual one. “Whether we like it or not, Phoenix is going forward,” was his summary of what they said.

The two MPs agree on the sequence of events: Phoenix began under the Conservative government, but significantly, was authorized to start under the Liberals in February.

That was after, the MPs pointed out, public service unions warned the system was not yet ready.

Lukiwski said he learned the government tested it with 16,000 simulated cheques — for a system that involves 70,000 transactions daily.

NDP MP Erin WeirTROY FLEECE /
REGINA LEADER-POST

“That’s not nearly enough to collect everything,” he said, adding government managers told the committee they’re confident the software is working properly, with the problems being training and input of data.

Weir noted the federal Liberal cabinet minister overseeing the public service, Judy Foote, did not attend this week’s committee meeting — though she was there for her ministry’s estimates in the spring.

Lukiwski said this week’s meeting told him government managers feel the old manual system for emergency payments “is basically gone because the automated system is online.”

Weir is baffled by that claim.

“Seems to me the federal government does have the capacity to write cheques and it’s unfortunate the cabinet has not extended that to managers in the public service,” said Weir, noting the first cheque for any federal employee — including himself — is a paper one, as opposed to direct deposit into bank accounts.

He also discerns a federal government changing its story as pressure mounts. First, it seemed to be downplaying the problem as affecting only a handful of workers. Now, he hears the Liberal saying it’s a big mess — but one caused by the Conservatives.

“What’s needed is for the government to take responsibility to fix the problem.”

The federal government has said it hopes the system will be running anew by October.

Added Lukiwski: “We’ll have to obviously wait and see because we’ve heard a number of predictions from the government already.”

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